Thanks for the response, Peter. I share your impatience with some post-rationalized justifications. Really I believe - post-Freudianly, I guess - that reason can never account for everything that a poet writes or ought to write, that a poem is in the end just human behaviour and that in large part we don't know why we do things.
I suppose I believe in a kind of eloquence that is more than speech, such eloquence as I might experience in a painting or a saxophone line. That essentially non-verbal eloquence can, I believe, be formed from "language as material" in the same way that painting might use egg-white or cadmium. The eloquence then inheres not so much in what remains of crushed syntax as in the contemplation of the whole artefact. That's the way I conceive it as working, anyway.
best,
michael
>My emphasis was on "reason". I think what I did in Excavations and what many of my contemporaries did was constantly tied to articulation, and the disregard of fully correct (written) grammar was or should have been expressive / dramatic. The opening half sentence implies the silent first half. Structures were interrupted rather than negated. I think that most of Exc. could be read legitimately as the interior monologue of a rather deranged 19th Century tumulus-digging vicar with a head full of madrigalian verse which he can't control.
>Reason: because that doesn't require a reason, and since then (tho it was already around) "different poetry" has had such a load of reasoning justification heaped on top of it, mainly for teaching/study purposes, most of it amounting to a deeply alienated and pessimistic view of the present condition of the West or the World, which is mostly unargued, unprovable, virtually inarticulate (certainly not articulated in the poetry since the poetry is programmatically disqualified from articulating its own raison d'ĂȘtre) . And of course the more extremist the justification, the heavier the damage done to language until the poetry becomes unreadable, deliberately and proudly. the whole structure is rationalistic: we bash up language because... I don't recognise this because, or the need to mess around with perfectly good functional language structures which remain our only tool of understanding.
>If interestingness is a bourgeois concept, is dullness a revolutionary one? (don't answer this question because I know the answer is Yes; I've seen it declared. )
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